Optometric manpower resources--1973. Part II.

The Optometric Manpower Resources Project, funded under government contract since June of 1971, has completed its 1973 national census of licensed optometric manpower in the United States. The first article in this series of three reported on the distribution of optometrists by census region and the current ratio of practicing optometrists to civilian population. This second article reports on the principal forms of employment of active optometrists, the distribution of number of years in practice and practice size. The data indicate that there has been a shift away from self-employment (88% in 1968, 77% in 1973) into more varied forms of salaried employment, especially among those in practice fewer than ten years. Practice size is shown to peak at between fifteen and twenty-four years in practice with a median of approximately 5,400 patients.